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On October 26, 1963, just four weeks before he was assassinated, John F. Kennedy travelled to Amherst College to honor an American poet. Robert Frost, who had recited “The Gift Outright” at Kennedy’s Inauguration, had died earlier in the year, at the age of eighty-eight. Now the college was dedicating a library in his name. Kennedy arrived at Amherst by helicopter and, before an audience of students and scholars, paid tribute to the role of the independent artist in society and to Frost himself—“one of the granite figures of our time in America.”

“When power leads man towards arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations,” Kennedy said. “When power narrows the areas of man’s concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of his existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses. For art establishes the basic human truth which must serve as the touchstone of our judgment.”

The rhetoric and rhythms of the speech, which was drafted by the historian and Kennedy confidant Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., are high-flown, very much of their era. In “The Kennedy Imprisonment,” Garry Wills was particularly scathing about the New Frontiersmen and their urbane self-fashioning, their determination to leave behind what they saw as the cultural enervation and poky suburbanism of the Eisenhower years. Kennedy’s circle, “the best and the brightest” as David Halberstam would call it, vibrated with Ivy League self-regard. Schlesinger recalled the early days of the Administration in which “Washington seemed engaged in a collective effort to make itself brighter, gayer, more intellectual. . . . One’s life seemed almost to pass in review as one encountered Harvard classmates, wartime associates, faces seen after the war in ADA conventions.” Kennedy’s language at the podium at Amherst would be unimaginable in the mouth of any modern political orator—say, Barack Obama—not because Obama is incapable of Kennedy’s complexity but, rather, because he knows that he would be talking past his audience as much as he was talking to them.

But alongside the flagrant élitism of the Kennedy style was an earnest effort in his Administration to highlight the value of the arts. The Kennedys invited Pablo Casals to the White House, where he played Schumann, Mendelssohn, and Couperin in the East Room. The American Ballet Theatre performed “Billy the Kid.” The Paul Winter Sextet played “Saudade da Bahia.” André Malraux came to dinner. It was at a reception of forty-nine Nobel laureates that Kennedy famously remarked, “I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.”

Since the Eisenhower era, there had been a bipartisan effort to build a national cultural center in Washington, D.C. After Kennedy was killed, L.B.J. renamed the center as a living memorial to J.F.K. When it opened, in September, 1971, Leonard Bernstein premièred his “Mass: A Theater Piece for Singers, Players, and Dancers,” and Judith Jamison, of the Alvin Ailey company, performed.

As of this week, thanks to the egocentric exertions of the current President and his obedient underlings and friends, the place has been renamed the Donald J. Trump and the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. The center’s board, now loaded with loyalists such as Maria Bartiromo and Laura Ingraham, of Fox News, made the grave decision at the Palm Beach manse of the casino magnate Steve Wynn, whose wife, Andrea, sits on the board. When Trump, who had been hinting broadly for the tribute online for months, heard the news, he feigned gratitude and shock. “I was surprised by it,” he said, fibbing effortlessly. The board insisted that the vote had been unanimous, but one Democrat who has yet to be booted from their midst, the Ohio congresswoman Joyce Beatty, said that she had called into the meeting but had been put on mute. “Everything was cut off,” she told Shawn McCreesh of the Times, “and then they immediately said, ‘Well, it’s unanimous. Everybody is for it.’ ” Various members of the Kennedy family (though not the Secretary of Health and Human Services) expressed their chagrin. Maria Shriver, J.F.K.’s niece, called the move “beyond comprehension.” But, with respect, is it really beyond comprehension?

This week, the President and his Administration managed to perform a dizzying array of their most distinguishing qualities. First came the cruelty of Trump’s remarks about the horrific murder of Rob Reiner and his wife, Michele Singer Reiner. Then came the chaotic disclosures of his chief of staff, Susie Wiles, who, during the course of no less than eleven interviews, told a writer for Vanity Fair that the Vice-President was a “conspiracy theorist” and that the President had an “alcoholic’s personality.” Her indiscretions came amid some heavy-lidded meetings in the White House (Wake up, Mr. President!) and Trump’s rant on the economy, in which he furiously assured citizens that things were just great: “Boy, are we making progress!” Trump’s fulmination had about it the whiff of desperation. As his popularity has sunk, many voters who might once have excused his myriad character deficiencies as the sordid price one pays for his alleged virtues now appear to be asking, “What is wrong with this person?”

Trump’s appropriation of naming rights to the Kennedy Center is hardly his worst sin. (It was arguably not even his worst sin of the week.) But it is offensive all the same. This President simply cannot tolerate the degree of freedom and independence that art and artists require. He cannot tolerate the questioning of Kaitlan Collins. Seth Meyers makes him crazy. Why would he value the audacity of the rebellious playwright or the fearless satirist?

There is no need to harbor romantic illusions about John Kennedy. He was a politician, not an artist. In Norman Mailer’s awestruck 1960 essay on J.F.K., “Superman Comes to the Supermarket,” he saw the young President as a heady and glamorous hero of sorts; reality soon erased such fantasies. But Kennedy nonetheless deserves to be the sole name on the façade of the performing-arts center; he recognized the value of artistic liberty in a way that no one with Trump’s authoritarian reflexes ever can. “If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him,” Kennedy said at Amherst College.

We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth. In free society, art is not a weapon, and it does not belong to the sphere of polemics and ideology. Artists are not engineers of the soul. It may be different elsewhere. But democratic society—in it, the highest duty of the writer, the composer, the artist is to remain true to himself and to let the chips fall where they may. In serving his vision of the truth, the artist best serves his nation. And the nation which disdains the mission of art invites the fate of Robert Frost’s hired man, the fate of having “nothing to look backward to with pride, and nothing to look forward to with hope.” ♦

Tyler Mitchell, the thirty-year-old photography phenom, has enjoyed a rocket-fuelled rise in the fashion and art worlds since graduating from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts less than a decade ago. In 2018, he became the first Black photographer to shoot a cover for Vogue, capturing Beyoncé in a frilly white prairie dress with an elaborate headpiece that simultaneously recalled Giuseppe Arcimboldo’s fantastical paintings, Frida Kahlo’s elaborate flower crowns, and Carmen Miranda’s fruit-basket hats. He has since done campaigns for fashion houses including Ralph Lauren, Louis Vuitton, Ferragamo, Balenciaga, Loewe, and Wales Bonner, and photographed for the catalogue of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s recent exhibition “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style.” He has had two solo exhibitions at the Gagosian gallery, which now represents him, and has been the subject of a handful of museum shows in the United States and Europe, including “Wish This Was Real,” currently on view at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie, in Paris. A hefty, handsome book of the same name, released recently by Aperture, features a diverse, almost absurdly heavy-hitting list of contributors including Anna Wintour, Rashid Johnson, and Drew Sawyer, the co-curator of the upcoming Whitney Biennial. “How lucky we all are,” Wintour writes in her essay, “to witness such a wizard at work.”

Visually, Mitchell’s images are sumptuous, stylish, and seductive, channelling the old-school photographic glamour epitomized by Richard Avedon, one of Mitchell’s idols. Conceptually, Mitchell’s work has its roots in his undergraduate education at N.Y.U. A mentor there was the artist and photographic historian Deborah Willis, whose scholarly excavations of photographs of Black beauty, stretching back to the nineteenth century, furnished Mitchell with a framework for his own art. By the time he made his Vogue cover, he had settled into a signature approach: harking back to Willis’s archive, and to the work of the photographer Kwame Brathwaite, a pioneer of the Black Is Beautiful movement, Mitchell committed to the enshrinement of Black splendor. Even in his personal work, such as the recent series “Ghost Images,” a gothically tinged exploration of the slave history of Georgia’s Sea islands, his subjects are lithe and comely, and the men are often photographed shirtless, giving some of the work a distinctly erotic air. During a recent conversation at his studio, in Brooklyn, Mitchell told me that he sees this style, in part, as a strategic appeal to the viewer’s attention. “I’ve always thought about beauty and photography as a hook to draw in the viewer, to talk about all sorts of things, whether it be identity, or memory, or presence, or history, or landscape,” he said.

“Family Tree,” 2021.

“Chrysalis,” 2022.

“Simply Fragile,” 2022.

Mitchell often conjures a vision of what he calls “Black utopia,” where his subjects lounge and play in a manner that mirrors his adolescent days in Georgia, which were spent skateboarding with friends, swimming in a pond near his parents’ suburban home, and taking solitary sojourns into nature. In one image—a favorite of mine—a man lies on an expanse of sand, cradling a smiling child, whose drool is pooling on the man’s shirtless chest. Many pictures feature Black subjects swimming or playing in water, a subtle reclamation of a leisure activity that has historically excluded some Black Americans, and a nod to a dark history of the Middle Passage. As idyllic as Mitchell’s scenes appear, they leave you wrestling with the uncomfortable reasons why they nevertheless feel so bracingly novel. In one image, a multi-generational crew is arrayed on the banks of a river, in a tableau that recalls Seurat’s Seine-side “La Grande Jatte”; to underline the comparison, one of the figures is painting en plein air.

Mitchell’s fondness for such references can make some of his pictures feel derived from art-historical mood boards put together by the fashion brands that employ him. A ghostly double exposure of a boy standing against a wood-panelled wall—titled “Lamine’s Apparition (After Frederick Sommer)”—points straight to Sommer’s compositionally identical portrait of the Surrealist painter Max Ernst. The new Aperture book gets its name from a video work featuring young men playing cryptically violent games in front of candy-colored backgrounds that are a visual match with some of the “Yearbook” pictures made by Ryan McGinley, an early influence of Mitchell’s. The list goes on: the picturesque beach tableaux in a Gagosian show earlier this year could be stills from Julie Dash’s groundbreaking film “Daughters of the Dust”; a picture of a mother and daughter primping themselves in a vanity mirror is strikingly similar to a pair of early self-portraits by LaToya Ruby Frazier; other work nods more or less explicitly to Viviane Sassen, Shōji Ueda, Charles and Ray Eames, James Van Der Zee, and Yasujirō Ozu, or re-creates scenes by Irving Penn and Gordon Parks. Even Tyler’s breakthrough Vogue cover bears notable parallels with an Annie Leibovitz one of Elle Fanning from the year before.

Mitchell sees these overt homages as a form of transparency. “I think I’m not myopic or naïve about the fact that we are in a dialogue with history always as artists,” he told me. “Why not bring that into the work with open arms?” But I find myself longing, instead, for this precociously skilled photographer to break out of the art-historical hall of mirrors and explore the open expanses of his own creativity. Some of Tyler’s strongest work to date avoids beguiling spectacle and leans instead into tenderness, as in that shot of the drooling baby, or another, from last year, titled “Summer Camp,” featuring a simple closeup of the sole of a man’s wet foot flecked with sand and grit that cling to his skin like barnacles. The picture exudes both grace and vulnerability, and hints at imperfection by way of a disconcerting, coral-like wrinkle that mars the foot’s heel. Here Mitchell shows us a different type of beauty, disconnected from the ethereal realms of haute couture and utopian summer fantasies, pointing quietly to the fragility of life itself.

Is there any object that holds as much promise as a new cookbook? Page after glossy page of scintillating meals-to-be, well-organized shopping lists that might send you to a new specialty store, the anticipation of happy, meditative hours spent shopping and prepping and cooking and serving. Many more than ten of this year’s new cookbooks earned a place on the seven-foot-tall bookcase I have designated for culinary titles. On my long list are “Third Culture Cooking,” by the Bon Appétit and Times contributor Zaynab Issa, who brilliantly and breezily upends the arbitrary boundaries that exist between global categories of cuisine; “Sesame,” by Rachel Simons, the co-founder of the brand Seed + Mill, which makes superlative tahini and halva; and “Something from Nothing,” Alison Roman’s paean to the pantry. I’m grateful that Hailee Catalano, one half of my favorite Instagram and TikTok cooking duo, has catalogued her subtly playful, vibrant, Italian-leaning recipes, in “By Heart”; that Enrique Olvera, the Mexican master chef known primarily for his relatively formal restaurants, has given us a wealth of more casual inspiration, in “Sunny Days Taco Nights”; and that Ada Boni’s “The Talisman of Happiness,” the Italian equivalent of “The Joy of Cooking,” originally published in the nineteen-twenties, has been translated into English for the first time this year.

2025 in Review

New Yorker writers reflect on the year’s highs and lows.

The selection below encapsulates my absolute favorites, the ones I found I could not stop thinking about and cooking from, the ones that struck me as most unique and satisfying. Some are more edifying than practical; a few deliver on pleasure and technique in equal measure.

“Hot Date!,” by Rawaan Alkhatib

A single-ingredient cookbook can be a tough sell—there are few ingredients that are both versatile and special enough to sustain a whole collection of recipes. In this book, Alkhatib, a cook, a writer, and an artist, who is of Palestinian and Indian descent, shows that the miraculous date—as in, the fruit of the date-palm tree, dried so that its sugars concentrate into a vessel for an intense and complex caramel flavor—deserves its due.

The beautiful book—rich with photos, Alkhatib’s own water-color illustrations, and her handwritten notes—investigates the history, cultural significance, and many varieties of the date, along with the unusually wide spectrum of contexts into which the savory-sweet fruit fits. Dates can be a simple snack, wrapped in bacon, or layered with kashkaval cheese for a grilled sandwich. They can be breakfast: mixed into tahini granola and blended with avocado for a smoothie or, more surprisingly, halved and sizzled in a pan before crowning an unfolded omelette, a dish known in northwestern Iran as ghisava and in Iraq as Cupid’s omelette, thanks to the date’s supposed aphrodisiacal qualities. Alkhatib also shares inventive ideas for adding sweetness and complexity to lunch and dinner, mixing dates with ground beef and pistachios to make nutty, savory meatballs; soaking them and stirring them into a marinade for miso-mustard salmon with asparagus; and loading them into condiments like butter or spiced chile crisp, as an anytime secret weapon.

“Six Seasons of Pasta,” by Joshua McFadden, with Martha Holmberg

The chef and restaurateur Joshua McFadden has a way with pasta, evident to anyone who’s been to his Portland Italian restaurant Ava Gene’s; to anyone who remembers eating at Franny’s, in Brooklyn, where he cooked in the early two-thousands; and to fans of his fantastic first book, also co-authored by Holmberg, “Six Seasons: A New Way with Vegetables.” A recipe from that title that I return to again and again is the spaghetti with Swiss chard, pine nuts, raisins, and chiles, an incredibly satisfying, indulgent yet nourishing combination, rich with both greens and butter.

This year, the duo returned with “Six Seasons of Pasta: A New Way with Everyone’s Favorite Food,” which offers more than a hundred ideas, for every type of mood and weather. For spring, McFadden and Holmberg suggest an Alfredo in which ribbons of leek mimic and enhance any long noodle, complemented by cream and shrimp and cheese—“to the chagrin of Italian traditionalists, I’m sure, but rules are for breaking as long as the results are delicious,” the recipe headnote reads. For early summer, there are beets with brown butter and poppy seeds, to dye gemelli a vibrant magenta; as fall approaches, green lentil ragù with roasted cherry tomatoes, to get caught in the crooks of cascatelli. (There’s also a new iteration of McFadden’s cult-favorite blended-kale sauce, with ideas for pairings such as chile crisp and borlotti beans, or tuna and pickled pepperoncini.) Winter already feels warmer with visions of charred cabbage and lemony pork-shoulder ragù stuck to glossy tubes of paccheri and showered in a mix of grated parm and pecorino.

“Braided Heritage,” by Jessica B. Harris

It can be hard to pin down an idea of “American food,” and easy to argue that a unified cuisine doesn’t exist here the way it does in Italy or France or Mexico. (Of course, look closely at any of those cuisines and you’ll realize how much most people oversimplify them, too.) In “Braided Heritage: Recipes and Stories on the Origin of American Cuisine,” the culinary historian Jessica B. Harris takes on the challenge by “establishing the American braid,” writing that “the early, original foodways of this country are the result of an intricate braiding of three overarching cultures: Native American, European, and African.” She turned to food-loving friends who grew up in different culinary traditions—many of them cooks and scholars—to gather their stories and family and community recipes.

Each recipe doubles as a lesson in cultural and culinary history. The very first, from Juli Vanderhoop, a Wampanoag chef from Martha’s Vineyard, surprised and delighted me: beer-battered maple leaves—which are, indeed, edible— with cranberry syrup. The Minneapolis Sioux chef Sean Sherman’s wild-rice-and-mustard-green cakes, made with what Sherman calls “Indigenous mirepoix” (winter squash, turnip, and sweet potato), are served with berry-bergamot sauce; Harris’s headnote explains that true wild rice, which grows only in the Great Lakes region, is completely unrelated to domesticated rice, and that wild bergamot—an oregano- and mint-adjacent herb native to North America—has nothing to do with the Sicilian bergamot orange.

Is there any dish so American as clam chowder, Manhattan or New England? In the book’s European section, we learn that the word “chowder” might have French etymology (it’s an Anglicization of chaudron, or “cauldron”) and that it’s believed to have its origins in both Brittany and Cornwall, England. The pages about African American cooking are recipes from Harris’s own life, including one for peanut brittle, which was a tradition on her mother’s side of her family, and which she used to make often that she bought a marble slab specifically for cooling it. Peanuts, though native to the American hemisphere, were brought to Africa by Portuguese and Spanish explorers and traders, and only became popular in the United States when the slave trade brought them back. Candy was often sold by enslaved and free African American women, to make extra cash, Harris writes, and recipes for peanut brittle “began appearing in American cookbooks in the nineteenth century, and rarely anywhere else. It is considered by many to be a truly American recipe.”

“Fat + Flour,” by Nicole Rucker

If you, like me, are a person who loves to bake and yet can never, ever remember to take your butter out of the refrigerator in time to bring it to room temperature, Nicole Rucker’s “Fat + Flour: The Art of a Simple Bake” will change your life. During an early-pandemic baking rut, Rucker, who owns Los Angeles’s Fat + Flour bakeries, was inspired to streamline her process, and skip the usual step of creaming butter and sugar together. She homed in on what she calls the cold butter method, or C.B.M. Making pie dough requires mixing cubes of cold, unsalted butter into dry ingredients, to insure a tender crumb—why couldn’t one do the same with cake batter, or cookie dough? The answer is: you can, as proved by her recipes for 1990s Oatmeal Chocolate Chunk Cookies (a “wrinkly, buttery” version that reminds her of her middle-school cafeteria) and a vanilla-coconut Bundt cake. The latter of those also deploys a “cold oven” technique that Rucker learned from her friend Cheryl Day, a baker and a cookbook author from Savannah, which requires placing your batter-filled pan in the oven before turning it on, for an especially even golden exterior, and a “textbook-tight crumb.”

And if you, like me, are a person who almost always has a bunch of deeply brown, gently oozing bananas sitting on your kitchen counter, you may be as delighted as I am by Rucker’s recipes for not one, not two—not even three—but five distinct banana breads, an inclusion that I’m glad she found an editor to support. (I heard her say, on a podcast, that several others tried to talk her out of it.) I knew I would enjoy her Classic 1980s Mom Banana Bread and the version with browned butter, but the Wholesome Hi-Protein Banana Bread—developed for her distance-cycling husband and made with health-nut ingredients including extra-virgin coconut oil, coconut sugar, almond flour, low-fat Greek yogurt, and protein powder—won me over, against the odds.

“Salt Sugar MSG,” by Calvin Eng, with Phoebe Melnick

I’ve been burned by many a restaurant cookbook, slamming it shut before I even attempt one of its unrealistic recipes, the kind clearly not developed with the home cook (or home kitchen) in mind. “Salt Sugar MSG: Recipes and Stories from a Cantonese American Home” is written by the chef Calvin Eng and his partner (in life and work) Phoebe Melnick, of the buzzy Brooklyn restaurant Bonnie’s. What I love about the book is how it absolutely captures the spirit of Bonnie’s, even while replicating very few of the dishes you can order there. Instead, you can make “fish mix,” a playful spin on Chex Mix featuring dried anchovies and dried shrimp; “hot salad” (romaine sautéed with garlic in soy sauce and oyster sauce, an excellent use for that head you’ve forgotten in the back of your crisper drawer); and a crazy-good Cantonese minestrone, heady with fennel seeds and fish sauce and blasted into Flavortown with half a tablespoon of MSG.

On my most recent flip-through, I laughed at—and was moved by—a chapter entitled “Mommy Knows Best,” which begins with an ode to Eng’s mother, Bonnie. She taught him everything he knows about Cantonese food, Eng says, cooking daily and lavishly for their family when he was growing up. This winter, I can’t wait to try the sweet-potato-curry potpie (inspired by Bonnie’s chicken-and-potato curry, a culinary consequence of the British colonization of Canton province) and the mini sweet-and-sour meat loaves—an homage to Americanized Chinese food, with canned lychees and ketchup in the sauce—which I suspect that even my small and choosy children will enjoy.

“What Can I Bring?,” by Casey Elsass

Another tricky category is what you might call the context cookbook, which provides recipes for a specific scenario that is sometimes too specific, so that the book ends up collecting dust on a high shelf. “What Can I Bring? Recipes to Help You Live Your Guest Life,” by Casey Elsass, a recipe developer known to some as “the cookbook doula” (he has collaborated on more than twenty titles) evades this pitfall. The book is incredibly useful not only for when someone invites you over and you’d like to contribute but also for when you’re having guests yourself: the recipes are all meant to be made ahead, and served at room temperature.

There are batch cocktails for any occasion (including a non-alcoholic spiced hibiscus punch), cornmeal crackers (“Yes, of course you could just go out and buy a nice box of artisanal crackers, but there is nothing more simultaneously passive-aggressive and effortlessly chic than rolling in with a batch of homemade,” Elsass writes), “scrunchy bread” made with frozen phyllo dough and feta, apps and salads (seven-onion dip! bagel panzanella!), and desserts galore—two chapters of them, Elsass explains, because dessert is so often the thing a host asks a guest to bring. All of the recipes are labelled in terms of how labor-intensive they are, so you can decide if you want to sweat over a mosaic Jell-O mold or an apple-and-Chinese-five-spice pie (“Roll up your sleeves”-level difficulty), or would prefer to toss together some “Party Krispies” or a flourless chocolate-olive-oil cake (“In your sleep”). As a bonus, Elsass suggests a few edible gifts for hosts, including homemade hot fudge and salty-sweet seasoned oyster crackers.

“Russ & Daughters,” by Niki Russ Federman and Josh Russ Tupper

One of the many downsides of moving away from New York City is a decreased proximity to Russ & Daughters, the century-old appetizing shop whose current stewards—a granddaughter and a grandson of one of the original daughters, who co-authored the cookbook, with the help of the food writer Joshua David Stein—have expanded it into multiple locations, including a charming sit-down café and a commissary bakery. The book, dense with history, including family photos and other memorabilia, is transporting and useful, full of recipes that conjure the turn-of-the-last-century Lower East Side. There’s mushroom-barley soup (before he sold fish, the original Russ, Joel, hawked strings of dried Polish mushrooms) and Aunt Ida’s stuffed cabbage (a painstakingly recovered Russ-family recipe) and ideas for how to use smoked fish.

There are also tips for assembling an appetizing platter, and a diagram divulging the secrets of smoked-salmon slicing, a tool I really could have used during a years-ago birthday brunch, when I only realized once the party had begun that the five pounds I’d ordered direct from a smokehouse was an entire, intact side of fish. We made do, somehow, with a plastic knife, blasphemy in the house of Russ, where the Gaspé Nova is famously so thin that you can read the newspaper through its translucence. And though I’ll decline to add fuel to the debate about whether one can get good bagels in my adopted home of Los Angeles, I will say that I was very happy to find the book’s recipes for varieties including egg and pumpernickel, which are harder and harder to find even in some parts of New York, plus bialys, challah, and Shissel rye (flecked with whole caraway seeds).

“Linger,” by Hetty Lui McKinnon

I am an omnivore through and through, but, if there were anyone who could convince me I don’t need meat (and, for the record, she’s not trying to), it would be Hetty Lui McKinnon, a Chinese Australian cook and writer. In “Linger: Salads, Sweets and Stories to Savor,” her sixth cookbook, she returns to the root of her culinary career: hearty vegetarian salads, which she began to make and sell in 2011, in her native Sydney, when she founded a delivery service called Arthur Street Kitchen. When Lui McKinnon moved to New York, in 2015, she hosted gatherings as a way to build community, serving spreads heavy on salad. After the pandemic, when she started hosting again, she doubled down on salads, and things that are nice to have with them or after them, such as Gruyère-jalapeño-scallion mochi balls, or a black-sesame Basque-style cheesecake made with tofu, instead of cheese.

Each salad in “Linger” beckons to me, dense, nutritious and jewel-like. Fans of the dumpling salad in “To Asia, with Love,” Lui McKinnon’s especially beloved fourth book, will thrill to a fresh iteration, featuring homemade samosa-inspired curry-potato-and-pea dumplings on a bed of quick-pickled cabbage. In an homage to Thanksgiving stuffing, she roasts apples, leeks, cubed bread, and sage, and tosses it all in a mustard vinaigrette. The combination of roasted sweet potato, butter beans, and radicchio, dressed in a corn-yuzu-scallion hot sauce modelled after a Noma Projects product, is a good example of the surprising, almost otherworldly alchemy that Lui McKinnon’s recipes achieve, as if she has access to a realm of ideas that the rest of us don’t.

“Good Things,” by Samin Nosrat

The cook and writer Samin Nosrat had a bit of an existential crisis after the publication of her first, incredibly successful cookbook, “Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat,” a hefty volume that taught people how to cook, by way of foundational principles and science- and tradition-backed techniques. What was she supposed to do after that, write a bunch of measly recipes? With the first book, Nosrat (who is a friend) really did help me become more intuitive in the kitchen, and yet I still relish her safety net of carefully developed, if limber, recipes. Her second book, “Good Things: Recipes and Rituals to Share with People You Love,” is warm, unfussy, and generously complete, covering all the bases without inciting a modicum of stress. I’m particularly partial to a section containing “seven versatile dressings (and three ways to use each),” a lesson in seeing potential in the kitchen. The same tahini sbagliato (Italian for “mistaken,” and the happy result of her failed attempt to develop a tahini-based ranch) can be drizzled over Little Gem lettuce or used as a marinade for chicken thighs, to be grilled as kebabs, finished with more dressing, and stuffed into pita pockets—homemade, if you like, but you can also use store-bought lavash.

For a recent dinner party, I doubled her recipe for one-pot chicken with pearl couscous, preserved lemon, and dates, a spin on a Nigella Lawson recipe that I’ve long loved. I liked Nosrat’s version even better, and it seemed to genuinely wow my crowd. Without her recipe for chicken schnitzel, a dish I make once a week or so, I would never have known to swap in potato starch for flour when dredging, for a long-lasting crisp crust, and to grind my panko crumbs to a finer, more even consistency. I’m grateful that she overcame her doubts and put this valuable compendium into the world.

“To Die For,” by Rosie Grant

Truth be told, I may never make anything from “To Die For: A Cookbook of Gravestone Recipes,” but I am inordinately glad that it exists. During an internship at the Congressional Cemetery, the writer, researcher, and archivist Rosie Grant stumbled upon a curious phenomenon: a number of deceased people, buried across the United States, who had requested that recipes be engraved into their tombstones. She began to collect the recipes, and to research the people buried with them, in some cases meeting and interviewing their families. Most of the recipes are for baked goods and sweets, including guava cobbler and Clubhouse-cracker bars, but there are also recipes for Jono’s Jack Daniel’s Marinade and for Whanitta Sheetz’s Fried Ripe Tomato. Grant even includes the recipe she’d like on her own gravestone someday: clam linguine. “My joy comes from the ritual of making it with others,” she writes. “It’s in the steam that rises when the clams pop open, the clink of glasses as you sit down to eat. The food is just the excuse to gather. And that, I think, is how I’d like to be remembered.” ♦

This past year, a computer scientist named Tuhin Chakrabarty tried to coax artificial intelligence into producing great writing. Chakrabarty, who had recently completed a Ph.D. at Columbia University, shared passages written by prominent authors, such as the Nobel laureate Han Kang, with leading large language models. Then he fed them a description of a specific scene (which he hadn’t shared) and asked the models to generate it in the author’s style. He also hired graduate students in creative writing to complete the same task—reading the sample passages and imitating their style—and to act as judges. In blind tests, the students consistently hated the A.I.-generated writing. The L.L.M.s were losing.

Chakrabarty and his collaborator Paramveer Dhillon, a University of Michigan professor, wondered if the A.I. output would improve if they fine-tuned GPT-4o, the model that powered ChatGPT at the time, by feeding it an author’s entire œuvre. One night in April, Chakrabarty was in Tokyo on vacation, jet-lagged and bored in his hotel, and he pushed almost all of Han’s translated writings into the model. But he purposely left out a passage from “The White Book.” It depicts the death of the narrator’s older sibling, two hours after being born.

In that grim scene, Han describes how the narrator’s mother reacts: “For God’s sake don’t die, she muttered in a thin voice, over and over like a mantra.” Before the fine-tuning, the A.I. renditions had been overwrought: “ ‘Live,’ she murmured, a chant that carried the weight of her being.” But now, when Chakrabarty fed the fine-tuned model the summary, the language seemed to bloom: “She held the baby to her breast and murmured, Live, please live. Go on living and become my son.”

Chakrabarty was amazed. The line broke him, he told me. This time, in another blind test, the creative-writing students universally preferred the A.I. version to the imitations that their peers had come up with. “Powerful,” one said of the mother’s quote. “Emotionally affecting,” another said. “A truly devastating line,” a third wrote.

As a novelist and a journalist covering A.I., I’ve tended to dismiss the threat it poses to authors. I won’t enlist A.I. to write on my behalf for the same reason that I won’t enlist a robot to do other hard stuff—hike a mountain, argue with my husband. But, lately, I’ve been pushing up against the limitations of that logic. I can write a book for my own reasons, but I can sell the book only if readers like it more than what they can get from, say, a chatbot. If readers prefer A.I.-generated fiction, then authors won’t be able to stop it.

As a rule, A.I. models have not consistently generated good writing. In a New York Times review of a mostly A.I.-generated novella, Dwight Garner said that its prose had “the crabwise gait of a Wikipedia entry.” In March, the C.E.O. of OpenAI, Sam Altman, posted some fiction that he’d prompted A.I. to produce. (The owner of The New Yorker, Condé Nast, has a corporate partnership with OpenAI.) No one seemed as impressed as Altman did. “I would encourage you to read some actual writing before declaring this good writing,” one of the most liked comments read. Then Chakrabarty e-mailed to tell me about his experiment.

After feeding Han’s writing into GPT-4o, Chakrabarty fine-tuned fresh versions of the model on the work of twenty-nine other authors, including a close college friend of mine, Tony Tulathimutte. Jia Tolentino once praised Tony’s short stories, saying that his “deviant instincts crackle in nearly every line.” I’d been reading him since the early two-thousands—and yet his A.I. clone could have easily fooled me. Here’s a sample A.I.-generated line: “He finally counted 18 breaths, and, to delay longer, opened up a new doc and composed the marriage proposal he’d send to the first man to make him cum without dildos or videos.”

Chakrabarty had started his project out of intellectual curiosity, but he was growing disturbed by its implications. Pangram, an A.I.-detection program, failed to flag almost all of the prose generated by his fine-tuned models. This suggested that anyone with some storytelling skills could feed a plot into a fine-tuned chatbot, slap their name on the resulting manuscript, and try to publish it. People often minimize A.I.-generated literature—after all, we read books to access someone else’s consciousness. But what if we can’t tell the difference? When Chakrabarty returned from Japan, he invited Jane Ginsburg, a Columbia professor who specializes in copyright law, to join him and Dhillon as a co-author of a paper about the research. Ginsburg agreed. “I don’t know whether what I’m scared about is the ability to produce this content,” she told me, “or the prospect that this content could be really commercially viable.”

Chakrabarty, now a computer-science professor at Stony Brook University, recently released a preprint of the research, which has not yet been peer-reviewed. The paper notes that graduate students ultimately compared thirty A.I.-generated passages—one imitating each author in the study—with passages written by their colleagues. They weren’t told what they were reading; they were simply asked which they liked best. They preferred the quality of the A.I. output in almost two-thirds of the cases.

Reading the authors’ original passages alongside the A.I. imitations, I was startled to find that I liked some of the imitations just as much. The A.I. version of Han’s scene, about the newborn’s death, struck me as trite in places. But, to me, the line about the mother’s chant was more surprising and exact than the original. I also spotted some good bits in an imitation of Junot Díaz. In “This Is How You Lose Her,” Díaz writes, “The one thing she warned you about, that she swore she would never forgive, was cheating. I’ll put a machete in you, she promised.” To my ear, the A.I. rendition was more rhythmic and economical: “She told you from the beginning that if you ever cheated on her she would chop your little pito off.” I’d been studying Spanish for a couple of years, but I had to look up pito—a word for “whistle” that I hadn’t heard before. Google’s A.I. overview told me that, in some places, it was also slang for “penis.” Díazian enough, I figured.

When I wrote to the authors whose work was used in the study, most declined to be interviewed or didn’t respond. But a few e-mailed their thoughts. Lydia Davis wrote, “I think the point is certainly made, that AI can create a decent paragraph that might deceive one into thinking it was written by a certain human being.” Orhan Pamuk said, “I am sure soon there will be much more exact imitations.”

Díaz and Sigrid Nunez agreed to be interviewed. Over Zoom, I asked Díaz about chopping someone’s pito off. “Pito, of course, just means ‘whistle,’ ” he said, apparently perplexed. I told him that, according to the internet, it could also be a double-entendre. “My memory sucks, but, in all my years as a fucking Domincian in the diaspora, that is not a thing that I have ever heard,” he told me. He thought that his doppelgänger’s vernacular was geographically and historically incoherent. “I tend to write in a very specific time-stamped Jersey slang,” he said. Plus, he added, the A.I.’s rhythm and characterization were no good.

Nunez described her A.I. copycat as “completely banal.” “It isn’t my style, my story, my sensibility, my philosophy of life—it’s not me,” she told me. “It’s a machine that thinks that’s what I’m like.” When I pointed out that skilled graduate students had found the passage well written, she questioned whether they had paid close enough attention, suggesting that they’d made thoughtless judgments so that they could return to their own writing. (She didn’t like their imitations, either.) “If I thought this reflected anything that actually had to do with my work, I’d shoot myself,” Nunez said.

Some of Díaz’s and Nunez’s complaints made a lot of sense to me. I could understand why both authors found their A.I. counterparts unimpressive; they were closer readers of their work than anyone else could be. It irritated me to hear tech bros acting as though A.I.’s imitative abilities conferred talent on the machine itself. A fine-tuned model that extrudes vaguely Díaz- or Nunez-shaped sentences was no more magical than an image model that, after being trained on Studio Ghibli art, extrudes vaguely Ghibli-shaped pictures. What I found less convincing, though, was Nunez’s argument that readers should be able to tell the difference.

I wanted to know how Díaz and Nunez felt, so I asked Chakrabarty to run an informal version of his experiment on my writing, with a twist: I would pit his model directly against me. To start, he fine-tuned a model on my published writing, much as he’d done in the formal experiment. Then I sent him four short excerpts from a novel that I’m currently writing. No one else had read these excerpts; they had never been published or circulated. There was no way that a large language model could have seen them before.

The narrator of my novel in progress is an Indian American ex-journalist. She runs a nonprofit that publishes stories from immigrant and refugee women, but it’s strapped for funding, so she courts an Indian American venture capitalist as a potential donor. Chakrabarty used an L.L.M. to create content summaries of the excerpts I’d sent him. (One representative sentence, from a summary about the narrator’s journaling habit, explains, “A pivotal memory is introduced: in ninth grade, the narrator’s mother read this journal, an act seen as a profound betrayal.”) Finally, he gave the summaries to his fine-tuned model, and he asked it to compose passages “in the style of Vauhini Vara.”

Going into all this, I was self-assured, even smug. I’d always felt that my style was original and, more important, that my books were totally distinct from one another. I figured that, even if the A.I. model could imitate my past books, it couldn’t predict the style of the novel in progress. So, when Chakrabarty sent me the A.I.-generated imitations, I was genuinely confused. Like Díaz and Nunez, I found lots of stylistic details—rhythm, verbiage—annoying. But the text produced by the model was eerily close to mine. Reading some of its lines next to my own, I couldn’t remember which was which. Unlike Díaz or Nunez, I even preferred some of the doppelgänger’s versions. My style seemed to be more consistent across projects than I’d realized.

I sent four passages to some readers who’d liked my previous books, explaining that half were mine and half were the model’s. I wanted them to guess which were which. The same passages are reproduced below so that you can try, too.

The first of my readers to respond was Dana Mauriello, my best friend from college and an accomplished tech entrepreneur. “Truth: this was terrifying!” she wrote. “I was so nervous that I would say that AI wrote something that you wrote, and you would be insulted!!!” Her anxiety, it turned out, was justified. She didn’t get any of them right.

Dana blamed this partly on her not being a writer. But, of my seven readers, none correctly identified more than half the passages. One of the last people I heard from was the novelist Karan Mahajan, a professor of literary arts at Brown University. He and I learned to write together in college, along with Tony Tulathimutte, and have been sharing drafts with each other ever since. He’s among the most perceptive writers and readers I’ve met. “Oof, this was really confusing and mindmelting,” Karan wrote. Then he, too, misidentified all four excerpts.

In the four passages above, the first and fourth were mine; the second and third were A.I.-generated. Dana described an A.I.-produced line that seemed hokey to me as “especially your style.” Another reader referred to an A.I.-generated quip as “your distinct style of wry humor.” I also got plenty of insults about passages that were legitimately mine: “verbose and heavy on cliché,” “weirdly elliptical,” “sounds like a book report,” “a lot of extra commas.” Most hated the passage about writing for an audience; only one attributed it to me. Karan called it “some hive mind’s ‘idea’ of literature.”

Surprisingly, I wasn’t hurt that my friends and fans couldn’t tell the difference. (If you could, congratulations—and if not, well, you’re not alone.) It helped that I myself had preferred an A.I.-generated line to the one that Han, a Nobel Prize winner, had written about her narrator’s mother. It also helped that I personally preferred my excerpts to the model’s, a few lines notwithstanding. I knew that my passages had come from an unpolished draft that I would revise heavily. I was reassured by the experiment’s limits, as well. Even if the A.I. model could create prose that passed for mine, that didn’t mean it could invent the content. Plus, there remained an enormous gap between a good sentence and a good novel. Still, I couldn’t avoid the truth. Seven excellent readers had mistaken an A.I. model for me. Seven excellent readers had mistaken me for an A.I. model.

It’s tempting to believe A.I. doesn’t really pose a threat to literature. Joan Didion once said, “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means.” People often frame the reading experience similarly. “When we read a book or listen to a piece of music or look at a painting, we seek the presence of another human being on the other side of it,” George Saunders wrote, in an essay titled “I Doubt the Machine Because the Machine Is Not You,” explaining his lack of interest in A.I.-generated prose.

The idea of literature as an expression of a writer’s individualism is a modern invention, however. In “Theory of the Novel,” the literary scholar Guido Mazzoni notes that in ancient Greece, the stories considered worth telling focussed on gods and heroes. The obsession with an author’s unique perspective started only with the rise of the European novel, around the nineteenth century. “Multiple points of view and the theoretical possibility of telling things in a different way abound in every novel, because it is assumed that each person, in theory, has the right to represent the world according to his or her perceptual and ethical angle,” Mazzoni writes. There were many ways to be a person; it followed that there were many ways to tell a tale.

It’s not coincidental that the novel became central to literary culture during a period of broader change: capitalism was creating a bourgeois class interested in their own private lives, and mass printing was making books more accessible. If societal transformations have changed our relationship with literature before, they could do so again. In an interview last month, Sam Altman predicted that the future would bring “a new way to interact with a cluster of ideas that is better than a book for most things.”

Given the current resistance to A.I.-generated prose, a shift toward such a future would have to begin stealthily—and maybe it’s already under way. Chakrabarty and Dhillon have used Pangram to estimate that, on Amazon Kindle, almost a fifth of recently self-published genre books included A.I.-generated text. (In their paper, lay readers—judges who weren’t creative-writing students—preferred the artificial output to human writing even in the earlier version of the experiment, before the fine-tuning.)

The literature that wins prizes and critical acclaim tends to be released through prominent publishing houses, which might insulate it from cannibalization—at first. Still, aspiring authors could use fine-tuned models and pass off the result as their own, even selling it to traditional publishers. Established authors—if not Díaz or Nunez—could fine-tune models on their past novels to produce new ones. If artificial prose eventually became normalized, then no one would need to hide their use of it, and A.I.-generated language could lead to the creation of new forms altogether, even successors to the novel. People could, at that point, engineer a new theory of what literature is for: maybe not human connection but, as Altman suggests, efficient delivery of idea clusters.

That’s one possible future. But, then, economic and technological changes have never been the only factors influencing culture; some argue that they’re not even the most important ones. Another crucial shift in people’s conception of literature came from twentieth-century Africa, Asia, and South America, where post-colonial thinkers conceptualized literature very differently—and more politically—than the individualistic European and American mind-set did. “Language carries culture, and culture carries, particularly through orature and literature, the entire body of values by which we come to perceive ourselves and our place in the world,” the Kenyan novelist Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o wrote, in his 1986 book “Decolonising the Mind.” He added, “Language is thus inseparable from ourselves as a community of human beings with a specific form and character, a specific history, a specific relationship to the world.”

After starting his career writing in the language of Kenya’s colonizers—English—Thiong’o turned to Gĩkũyũ, the language he’d been raised with, and exhorted other African authors to make a similar choice. He saw literature as a collective and political experience. (He noted that “professional readers” sometimes took it upon themselves to narrate his work to patrons in bars; when a reader emptied his glass, the audience would shout, “Give him another bottle of beer!” so that he would keep reading.)

Thiong’o’s approach is instructive in the age of artificial intelligence. His work reminds us that language generated by A.I. also carries culture and values—which the companies behind the models largely determine themselves. Sometimes this manifests in obvious ways: recent research found, for example, that when major L.L.M.s and humans were asked to describe possible futures, the models were far more likely to mention words like “technology,” “digital,” and “A.I.” At other times, it’s more subtle—such as when Anglocentric models prove inept in non-English contexts, leading to culturally offensive outputs and even biases in criminal justice and education. That the A.I. model imitating Díaz didn’t perfect the nuances of his slang use isn’t shocking; for all the pages of his writing that it had absorbed, the product didn’t represent him. I imagine that if Díaz’s imitator had a face, it would look less like him and more like Altman in a sombrero. The most important question isn’t whether Altman has a convincing Spanish accent; it’s how to collectively escort him out of the party.

The European conception of reading and writing as a private experience can be an isolating one. Thiong’o’s characterization of literature as a site of collective understanding and action offers us a different path. We could use our literature—novels, but also the other forms of communication available to us in the digital age—to collectively envision and enact all sorts of alternatives to the future Altman describes.

In their paper, Chakrabarty and his co-authors provide some suggestions: A.I. companies could keep their models from producing any imitations that aren’t parodies, and judges could consider A.I.-generated writing to be copyright violations unless A.I. involvement is disclosed. Chakrabarty told me that he supports a ban on what he himself did—fine-tuning A.I. models on authors’ writing. He even proposed that authors could be barred from doing it with their own work, since that, too, could flood the market with artificial writing. This is technically feasible. It requires only that people collectively demand it.

When I requested an interview with Han, through her literary agent, I didn’t hear back. But Han has spoken at length about becoming a writer. As a child, she learned about a 1980 massacre that had taken place in her home town of Gwangju, South Korea, ending a pro-democracy movement. She was moved to ask, in her specific political and cultural context: What is the purpose of being a human? In her Nobel Prize acceptance speech, she made reading and writing sound almost like one interconnected practice. “Following the thread of language into the depths of another heart, an encounter with another interior,” she said. “Taking my most vital, and most urgent, questions, trusting them to that thread, and sending them out to other selves.”

Han has also spoken of the scene in “The White Book,” the one about the mother and her dying infant. She told the Guardian that, before she had ever written the novel, she had been haunted by a particular fragment of dialogue: “Don’t die. Please don’t die.” Eventually, her mother suggested that Han must have heard the phrase from her. “She told me she kept saying those words repeatedly to the sister who had died before I was born,” Han recalled. The line that I’d liked less than an A.I. imitation, it turned out, was pulled almost directly from her life.

I haven’t read “The White Book,” but I recently reserved it at my local library. I, too, lost my older sister. I, too, prayed that she would live. I’m looking forward to picking up the thread that Han cast out. I’m looking forward to holding it and wondering, along with her and everyone else, about the purpose of being human. ♦

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The Republican Susan Collins has held one of Maine’s Senate seats for nearly thirty years, and Democrats, in trying to take it away from her, have a lot at stake. Graham Platner, a combat veteran, political activist, and small-business owner who has never served in office, seemed to check many boxes for a progressive upstart. Platner, who says he and his wife earn sixty thousand dollars a year, has spoken passionately about affordability, and has called universal health care a  “moral imperative.” He seemed like a rising star, but then some of his past comments online directed against police, L.G.B.T.Q. people, sexual-assault survivors, Black people, and rural whites surfaced. A photo was published of a tattoo that he got in the Marines, which resembles a Nazi symbol, though Platner says he didn’t realize it. He apologized, but will Democrats embrace him, despite ugly former views? “As uncomfortable as it is, and personally unenjoyable, to have to talk about stupid things I said on the internet,” he told David Remnick, “it also allows me to publicly model something I think is really important. . . . You can change your language, change the way you think about stuff.” In fact, he frames his candidacy in a way that might appeal to disappointed Trump voters: “You should be able to be proud of the fact that you can turn into a different kind of person. You can think about the world in a different way.”

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Early in 2025, the staff writer Calvin Tomkins decided to chronicle turning a hundred in the same year as The New Yorker’s hundredth anniversary, in a piece titled “Becoming a Centenarian.” Tomkins first contributed to The New Yorker at the age of thirty-two, and he soon developed a specialty: writing about visual artists, and exploring the source of their originality. “I knew nothing about contemporary art. I had not intended to write about art or artists,” he said. “It just happened that way. It sort of took hold of me.” The first of these profiles was published in 1962, and they were eventually collected in the six-volume anthology “The Lives of Artists.” Just last year, nearing the age of ninety-nine, Tomkins wrote about Rashid Johnson, who was mounting a major survey at the Guggenheim Museum. David Remnick celebrates Tomkins’s life and career on the week of his hundredth birthday.

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